Shu Lea Cheang
«BRANDON»

The project, which is now offline again, was originally announced on June 30, 1998, by the Guggenheim Museum, presenting its first artist's project commissioned for the World Wide Web exploring issues of gender fusion and techno-body in both public space and cyberspace.

«BRANDON derives its title from Brandon/Teena Brandon of Nebraska, USA, a gender-crossing individual who was raped and murdered in 1993 after his female anatomy was revealed. Cheang's project deploy's Brandon into cyberspace through multi-layered narratives and images whose trajectory leads to issues of crime and punishment in the cross-section between real space and virtual space. The project, a multi-artist/multi-author/multi-institutional collaboration, will unfold over the course of the coming year, with interface developed (1996-1997) for artist collaboration and public intervention: bigdoll interface, roadtrip interface (Jordy Jones, Susan Stryker, Cherise Fong); Mooplay interface (Francesca Da Rimini, Pat Cadigan, Lawrence Chua) and panopticon interface (Beth Stryker and Auriea Harvey). System programming by Linda Tauscher. During 1998-1999, we would invite guest curators to institute multi-author upload for each interface.

In development with Society for Old and New Media, DeWaag, two netlink forum/installation are also scheduled for Theatrum Anatomicum interface (with Mieke Gerritzen, Roos Eisma, Yariv Alterfin, Atelier Van Lieshout): The first, «Digi Gender Social Body: Under the Knife, Under the Spell of Anesthesia,» to be held in fall 1998, will bring together noted cultural critics, genderists, surgeons, and bio-technologists to reconsider binary codes of male-female and the mapping of the digital body. The second forum, held in May 1999 in conjunction with the Institute on Arts and Civic Dialogue at Harvard University, is entitled "Would the Jurors Please Stand Up? Crime and Punishment as Net Spectacle." The event, which will incorporate avatar performance and the deployment of a virtual court system, will convene a panel of legal scholars and provocateurs to preside a net public trial of sexual assaults in RL (real life) and cyberspace.

BRANDON is curated by Matthew Drutt, Associate Curator for Research, Guggenheim Museum (http://www.guggenheim.org) and produced in association with Society for Old and New Media, Amsterdam (http://www.waag.org) Caroline Nevejan and Suzanne Oxenaar/curators; Institute on the Arts and Civic Dialogue, Harvard University (http://www.arts-civic.org) Anna Deavere Smith and Andrea Taylor/directors; Banff Center for the Arts, Alberta (http://www-nmr.banffcentre.ab.ca) Sara Diamond/director of media arts.

BRANDON is part of a broader program in the media arts being led by John G.
Hanhardt, Senior Curator of Film and Media Arts at the Guggenheim Museum.»

(Source: nettime: http://www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-9806/msg00076.html)